Owls, Voles and Bones

 I have become more interested in bones since I broke my ankle and got to look at the X-ray:

My ankle is now held together with various bits of metalwork.  I had mistakenly thought that my ankle was made up of several separate bones but it looks as though most of it is the ends of your leg bones and the big bone that forms your heel.

Over the past year, I have found several owl pellets. Some were on the balcony area of our shed, and some were found on boulders up Glen Banchor.  Both places are where owls can perch and digest their catch. Owl pellets are made up of the non-digestible parts of their food and are regurgitated as pellets of fur and bones.

Dissecting an owl pellet is probably the closest most of us will get to being a forensic pathologist and doing a postmortem!

Owl pellets - some intact (top right) and some starting to disintegrate (on left)

Some I could identify such as the pelvic bone bottom left.

Pelvic bone with the pin pointing to the  round socket (for the ball of the leg bone (femur) to fit in)

 The skulls are made of very thin bones which fragmented but I did find one almost complete skull.

Skull

The jaw bones tended to survive best, and the teeth patterns provide a way of identifying what creature was eaten. 

Upper jaw

Tooth pattern

I think most of the remains were from Field Voles. My dog regularly catches Field Voles when out on a walk and unfortunately some also make their way into the house and get caught in the mouse trap.

Occasionally I see evidence of Voles in the garden - a hole and leaves under a flower tub or once I saw two fighting and squeaking  (at least I thought they were fighting - maybe it was something more romantic?)

Mistletoe

As I am confined to home for the next few weeks while my ankle heals,  I decided to write a post about a Christmas plant.  Mistletoe is often hung inside houses at Christmas and the tradition is that if you meet someone underneath it, then you kiss, (though I am not sure if this is allowed in Covid times!)  

Mistletoe (Viscum album) does not grow locally as this distribution map from the BSBI website shows:

It is most common in southern England and I have seen it on apple trees in the South West and very abundantly near London, in Bushy Park (by Hampton Court) where the trees are liberally festooned with round green clumps, which are easily seen in the winter when the trees are bare. It is spread by birds eating the white berries which leaves their beaks sticky and they wipe off the sticky seed onto a tree branch where it might grow.  Mistletoe is semi-parasitic, depending on the tree for nutrients but also able to photosynthesise as it has green leaves.

Mistletoe features in Norse myths, which is surprising as it does not seem to like Northerly districts and only grows in Southern Scandinavia. One story says that the mischievous god Loki used mistletoe to kill Baldur when all other plants had sworn not to harm him.

If you are interested in Norse Myths, there is a dramatisation of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology on Radio 4 on Christmas Day 2021 and it will be available for a short time afterwards:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001rjt